In her fifth collection, celebrated poet Anne Compton turns her attention to smaller objects — the strangeness of thought that plays around common, everyday things and occasions, such as sleep and meals. Here she is a diarist of her immediate surroundings — of a river, fog in its variations, the reliable return of plant and birdlife. The book arcs from the objects observed to the observing mind, its vagaries and slippages, recalling the persons, places, and things that make up a life.
Anne Compton
Is a two-time winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize and winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry for her second collection, Processional. In 2008, she was awarded the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English Language Literary Arts. A former teacher and writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick at Saint John, she developed and directed the acclaimed Lorenzo Reading Series.
"[Compton's] poems and prose-poems provoke and stimulate thinking about where the boundaries between experience, observation, perception, expression, and communication might lie."
— PN Review
"Her writing points to a persistent, saving grace, a lyric remainder — given 'the small manoeuvres left us now' — that can still find its way somehow into these moving, finely made poems.
— Event
About this part, turn aside at the last.
Finalist for the 2020 Atlantic Book Awards' M. Abraham Poetry Award
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